Rajeshwar has written a short description on how to use the GlassFish v3 REST Interface to Configure GlassFish; this complements his previous entry REST and Monitoring and, like that one, it also has examples using a Jersey-based client - included in the post. Related entries are tagged REST+GlassFish+v3. PS. Picture at left shows the anterior eyes of a Jumping Spider.

As expected, after last week's big VirtualBox 3.0 Release we now have a 3.0.2 maintenance release. See the Changelog and get it from the Download sites. In the meantime, adoption of VirtualBox continues to grow (Google Trends, VBox Buzz).

VirtualBox 3.0, is now available for download. This is a major release (PR), most notable is support for guest SMP support - up to 32 vCPUs. Also included is support for OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests and experimental support for Direct3D 8/9 on Windows guests. Check the Changelog Details and then go to download page.

Andy has a nice Overview and Podcast; Jeff has an overview focused on Virtual SMP Support. Other Sun reviews come from Rudolf and Homer. Non-Sun reviews include Softpedia, Virtualization Review and an early mention in InfoWeek.

The ZDnet/CNet folks have several reviews on VirtualBox and seem increasingly positive about it - see Jason Perlow's Very Positive Review (earlier last year he had written a V12N Comparison based on VBox 1.6) and Dan Kusnetzky Review; also see their Screenshot Gallery. On the CNetTV, check Tom Merritt's story on Installing Windows 7 RC on VBox.

Finally, this is a very interesting release and I believe it will make a big difference in applicability of VirtualBox, but all major releases "push the envelope" a bit. I'm not in the VirtualBox team but, based on their Release History I'd expect follow-up maintenance releases "soon".

Earlier in the month, we announced a Virtual Image for WebSpace. In the note I mentioned that that image included a "JeOS OpenSolaris Prototype", and that effort was Formaly Announcement on Tuesday. JeOSs play an important piece of the virtualization story, so here is a set of links to get you up to speed quickly.

JeOS stands for "Just Enough OS" ("just right" as with the Three Bears). JeOS is usually described as including the JeOS media ( OS core {Kernel,Drives,Login} + OS Mimimum maintenance tools + Minimum user space tools ) + Packages repository (DVD or Network based). The term is relatively new; an early (initial?) reference seems to be from Jordi's; also see Cocktail. There are different JeOS depending on what OS they are based. Linux is currently a popular base; three variants are Ubuntu JeOS (Wikipedia, WebSite, and How to use it), Oracle (Oracle EL JeOS and Product Page) and Novell (Novell SUSE JeOS, LimeJeOS Blog details).

We believe that there are some benefits in having an OpenSolaris based JeOS, and several folks have been working on that. The Announcement Above is part of that process; more links in follow-up notes.

Several teams at Sun have collaborated to put together a Virtual Machine Template for the GlassFish WebSpace Server. The image is available in a number of formats for VirtualBox (OVF, VDI) and for VMware Workstation (VMDK) and VMware Server ESX (VMDK) and bundles WebSpace, GlassFish, MySQL, and a JeOS prototype of OpenSolaris. With this image the evaluation of WSS is very easy: I already had VBox so I first downloaded the OVF Image; then I imported it and accepted its Configuration Panel, started it, read the end point URL from the VBox Console, pointed my browser there and followed the link in the Image Start Page to the WebSpace Welcome Page. More details at Gabor's Announcement and in the Documentation Page.

I have uploaded the recordings rom last Friday's Special Webinar on VirtualBox. This includes FlashVideo, MP3 and also SlideCast, which allows you to skim through the slides and listen to the recording for the sections you are specially interested. In this webinar, s7 talks about how RDP is used in VBox; s10 on how 21K VBox images will be used during JavaOne; s11 on the VBox release cycle (s11); s12/s13 shows adoption indicators, and s25ff talks about the VBox Networking modes.

I'm planning to provide SlideCast versions of all future recording, and also convert some of the previous ones.

Yesterday a portion of Google's network's infrastructure had a Two Hour Failure which impacted an unknown (but sizeable) number of users - see PCWord, InformationWeek, WashingtonPost, Forbes, plus #googlefail@Twitter.

This seems a good reminder of the benefits of a private cloud for mission-critial operations in enterprises... and of the benefits of standards in reducing the cost of exit.

Google AppEngine has added Java support (announcement). The list of JVM-based languages includes JRuby, Groovy, Jython and Scala. A list of the supported standards is here; the intention seems to be to provide a "web tier" set of specs for Java and JVM-based languages but the details are not very clear (to me), for example, it claims Servlet 2.4 (not 2.5), some version of JPA, partial JSP support. Hopefully the list will evolve into one of the modern standard at some point; perhaps the Web Profile in Java EE 6?

Today, at CommunityOne East, Sun unveiled more details of its Cloud initiative: A world of many clouds, both public and private, that are open and compatible. The initiative enables the definition and deployment of Virtual Data Centers, leveraging q-Layer, xVM and VirtualBox and components like OpenSolaris, MySQL, GlassFish and Web Stack. For more details, check Cloud@Sun, the Launch Event and this Overview. I also enjoyed reading/watching about the SuperNat center and TheRegister ran an Overview White Paper.

Also check the personal perspectives from Craig and Tim, who were directly involved in defining the RESTful API for manipulating the cloud. The APIS are under Creative Commons license (see Opening APIs) and are available at Kenai, see API home and Hello Cloud project.